Defenders by Will McIntosh Read Free Book Online Page B

pace. He was late, and he couldn’t easily explain why that was, because the truth was he’d been on the toilet, dealing with anxiety-induced diarrhea.
    It was one thing to be drafted into the CIA, given the circumstances, but this—this was too much. Maybe his background made him the perfect candidate to attempt communication with this Luyten, but his disposition did not. He was not an action guy; he was a behind-the-scenes guy. He should be in Research, advising someone on how to approach the situation; he should not be approaching the situation himself. But so many of the action guys and gals were dead, and Oliver had to admit, on
paper
he seemed ideal for this assignment. He knew more about how to bend someone to one’s will with words and gestures, more about the use of language to gain power, than anyone alive. He just wasn’t sure how well that knowledge translated into action.
    He watched the room numbers pass on the big steel doors, but it turned out that wasn’t necessary. Ariel Aardsma, his supervisor, was waiting in the doorway of the room he was looking for, her arm across the shoulders of Kai, the boy who’d talked to a Luyten. Assuming he was telling the truth.
    Kai was big for a thirteen-year-old, but with a baby face, and long-lashed eyes. He was staring into the room where the Luyten was being held.
    “Dr. Bowen,” Ariel said. “This is Kai.”
    The boy went on staring into the room. As Oliver reached them, he peered inside the room as well.
    The Luyten was unconscious in its cell. It was mustard yellow, its body housed in a thick, ornately ridged exoskeleton. Doctors had sealed the massive wound, injected binders to facilitate healing. Oliver eyed the stump, trying to imagine what it had looked like when the soldiers went under the church to get it. They’d said that after losing the limb in the crash, the thing had sutured the gaping wound closed with electrical wiring it pilfered from an air-conditioning unit under there.
    Being so close to it was unnerving.
    “Kai has been very helpful,” Ariel said. “We’ve had a good talk with him.”
    Oliver had watched the interview remotely the day before. Incredible as it was, the boy’s story checked out in every detail. The woman’s corpse in the bus repair depot, the key under the flagstone, the hidden cache of food, his intimate knowledge of the local woman’s relationship with her daughter; all of it had checked out.
    Beyond the facts, Kai looked scared to death. He kept swallowing, and he was blinking rapidly, his hands dangling limply at his sides. This was not a kid who craved the attention that came with making wild claims about telepathic conversations with Luyten. Under ordinary circumstances Oliver would have been repulsed by the idea of subjecting this child to any more close contact with the Luyten, but these circumstances were as far from ordinary as they got.
    Ariel led them into the room, closer to the Luyten. Kai was staring at it like it might leap from the cell and tear him apart at any moment.
    “It can’t reach us. Don’t worry.” It had to have been a kid. Oliver was clueless when it came to kids. He didn’t know how to talk to them, was uncomfortable in their presence. When his sister visited with her children, Oliver always found urgent work he needed to do.
    “Well,” Ariel said, “I’ll leave you to it.”
    Evidently Kai shared Oliver’s wish that Ariel stay, because he watched her leave with an expression bordering on panic. Ariel and others would be monitoring remotely, but Oliver was on his own when it came to getting Kai to relax.
    “Why don’t you sit down?” Oliver gestured toward a chair.
    Kai sat on the edge of the chair like a kid in the principal’s office. The room didn’t help things; it was bland and oppressive, windowless, nothing on the walls but an American flag in a wooden frame, and the ubiquitous population tracker, doggedly ticking back the dwindling world population.
    “So it looks